RE: Re: draft-ietf-html-style-00.txt & class as a general selector

> Chris Lilley wrote:
>So in this example, [ is exactly equivalent to my use of @. It means 
>that an attribute value is coming.
>...
>The ] does not make it easier to parse. The end of the attribute 
>value and the start of the declaration are clearly delimited by 
>the {

Well, that depends.  I would say [...] _encapsulates_ an attribute 
specification.  The end of the attribute  value might otherwise need to be 
terminated by a ) or a , (context sensitivity or grouping, respectively).

>> Ah, but the class attribute specification is obviously not meant to 
scale. 
>
>Why not?

I didn't mean it *shouldn't* be intended to scale, just that the 
specification was obviously a one-shot deal, meant for specifying class and 
nothing else.

>> ?  I thought there was already a "proposal" for generalized attribute 
>> selection - the [attribute=value], or just [attrib] for existence, 
format.
>
>Yes. I was saying that some of the tokens in there are superfluous. I made 
>another proposal. This also had the advantage of being clear that a.b was 
>a short form of the generic syntax I proposed, which can be applied to 
other
>SGML DTDSs in addition to HTML. It regularises things.

Ah.  Merely a different syntactic proposal.

>>  That was, I believe, the point of making "[ID=value]" so complex in 
>> comparison (I don't know why we didn't just do "[CLASS=foo]" from the 
>> beginning - perhaps we should?
>
>To make them more consistent? Fine. Although, as I say, the trailing 
>square bracket is not doing anything.

I'd still vote for it, the same way I wish <LI> were forced to be a 
container.

	-Chris